Saturday letters: The Confederacy

Copyright 2014: Houston Chronicle

Published 7:18 pm, Friday, July 18, 2014

Perspective

Regarding "Confederate license plates fuel passions" (Page B7, Friday), Jerry Patterson provides convincing evidence that the Sons of Confederate Veterans cannot be trusted with our nation's history. His Lincoln quote opposing racial equality is genuine, but he has it in the wrong year, the wrong town, in a state Lincoln never visited. And he leaves out much of the context of Lincoln's speech of 1858 in Charleston, Illinois, which satirized Democrats' fears of "amalgamation" by pointing up Andrew Jackson's vice president, who had lived openly with mulatto slave mistresses, concluding with the quip: "I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the [N]egro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a [N]egro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife."

Lincoln was not about to commit political suicide in Southern Illinois, but he showed a remarkable capacity for growth on race issues. Lee may have realized in 1856 that "slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil," but he failed to put this conviction into practice in 1861. When in the final, desperate months of 1865 he supported enlisting black soldiers in the Rebel army, the Richmond Examiner questioned whether he could be considered "a true Southerner." Phaedra Dugan has laid out the evidence of what the Confederacy was really about: slavery and white supremacy.

Patterson cites the precedents of the American, Mexican and Texas revolutions, conveniently forgetting that none of them involved a revolt against a democratic government. (Brings to mind the Tea Party "patriots" calling upon the Founding Fathers' fight against taxation without representation to oppose taxation with representation.) Give the Rebels their due: They did "punch above their weight."

Nobody said it better than General Grant: They "had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

Texas had even less excuse than other Rebel states: In 1836 the Republic had voted 97 percent in favor of immediate annexation to the U.S., though it took nearly a decade to convince "us" that "y'all" were worth the trouble (slavery had something to do with that). When it was finally achieved, the Republic's last president stated in his farewell, "The lone star of Texas has passed on and become fixed forever in that glorious constellation which all freemen and lovers of freedom in the world must reverence and adore - the American Union."

But perhaps we should err on the side of generosity and allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans a license plate, provided that they add a truth-in-advertising line: The folks who hounded Sam Houston out of office.